Most of the casinos online have very thorough security and their safety levels are usually supported by the latest technologies in the world. Casinos pay a lot of attention to the cyber theft, and there have been a reportedly lower number of successful attacks.
However, a teenager from Finland managed to rob an online casino from Malta simply because he managed to “spot and exploit” a glitch that appeared in the software of this online platform. According to the local news outlet Yle, this happened last year, and the sum was just a bit over €250,000. Everything we know about the casino is that it is licensed in Malta. However, the name of the casino was never revealed.
When it comes to the teenager from Finland, one thing is sure – he was underage at the time of exploiting the glitch. He comes from Forssa, which is a municipality in Finland. The teenager’s name is also not revealed to the public, but he appeared in the Häme District Court and had several fraud charges against him that are related to that casino. The teenager is likely to end up 20 months in prison for exploiting the bug to transfer big amounts of money.
But he is not the only one who will face charges. When the money was transferred, the teenager used bank accounts from his parents, which means that they are probably included in this money-laundering operation as well. They are also facing accusations and are likely to serve the sentence as well.
How He Did It
According to Yle, the young Finnish resident first saw that there was a glitch in the software. He proceeded to make an account with a fake birth date in order to be able to access the casino. The website’s glitch was in the money transfer. It allows customers to cancel the return of the funds and to have the refund paid out to their wallet online or to their bank account. The teenager took advantage of this IT-related issue for a month and managed to transfer a total of €252,000.
Those were all casino funds which eventually went to his bank account. Yle reported that there was a total of 417 transactions that happened between the April and May of 2017. The casino became aware of this issue two months later, in July 2017. The court papers state that €14,000 was transferred to the bank account of the boy’s father, and €2,300 to the boy’s mother. Furthermore, she bought a €5,000 motorcycle with another part of the stolen funds.
The father would probably get a five-month suspended sentence, while the mother would probably get a bit more lenient sentence. The District Court will meet on September 3 in order to deliver the ruling, as Yle states.
